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International Conference on Computer Aided Verification

CAV 2012: Computer Aided Verification pp 123–138Cite as

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Proving Termination of Probabilistic Programs Using Patterns

Proving Termination of Probabilistic Programs Using Patterns

  • Javier Esparza18,
  • Andreas Gaiser18 &
  • Stefan Kiefer19 
  • Conference paper
  • 3673 Accesses

  • 34 Citations

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNTCS,volume 7358)

Abstract

Proving programs terminating is a fundamental computer science challenge. Recent research has produced powerful tools that can check a wide range of programs for termination. The analog for probabilistic programs, namely termination with probability one (“almost-sure termination”), is an equally important property for randomized algorithms and probabilistic protocols. We suggest a novel algorithm for proving almost-sure termination of probabilistic programs. Our algorithm exploits the power of state-of-the-art model checkers and termination provers for nonprobabilistic programs: it calls such tools within a refinement loop and thereby iteratively constructs a “terminating pattern”, which is a set of terminating runs with probability one. We report on various case studies illustrating the effectiveness of our algorithm. As a further application, our algorithm can improve lower bounds on reachability probabilities.

Keywords

  • Outgoing Edge
  • Initial Node
  • Short Word
  • Probabilistic Program
  • Transition Invariant

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Informatik, Technische Universität München, Germany

    Javier Esparza & Andreas Gaiser

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

    Stefan Kiefer

Authors
  1. Javier Esparza
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  2. Andreas Gaiser
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  3. Stefan Kiefer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 3226 Siebel Center, 201 N. Goodwin Avenue, 61801-2302, Urbana, IL, USA

    P. Madhusudan

  2. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, 253 Cory Hall # 1770, 94720-1770, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Sanjit A. Seshia

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Esparza, J., Gaiser, A., Kiefer, S. (2012). Proving Termination of Probabilistic Programs Using Patterns. In: Madhusudan, P., Seshia, S.A. (eds) Computer Aided Verification. CAV 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7358. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31424-7_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31424-7_14

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